Friday, November 03, 2006

Search engine results issue

This is probably a very stupid, blogging 101 question but I have to ask since I haven't found the answer in the archives here. I've noticed that when my one of my posts comes up in a Google search, the link sends the person to my main page and not to the post itself. Obviously this would be a problem since I don't want people to have to search through my entire blog to find the information for which they're looking. Any suggestions about how to resolve this? Thanks in advance for your assistance and Happy Friday!

6 comments:

Your posts all come up with the article when I search under Google Blog Search but under your main page under Google Web Search. This means that it's been a long time since Googlebot visited your site, and probably the same is true of other search engines. Best to register with Google, Yahoo, MSN etc individually. Each one provides a method for you to register your site which you can find easily by web searching.

For Google, find Google Webmaster Tools and follow the instructions. Register a sitemap, which in the case of a Blogger site such as yours is simply atom.xml at your Blogger website address. This will get you searched and indexed more regularly.

When Google "found" those articles, they were on your main page. Google therefore "knows" where to find that information, and sends people there when they type corresponding keywords into Google. Since Google (probably) only indexes your site every few weeks, that information could now have disappeared into your archives.

Couple of things you could do - send a sitemap to Google automatically every time you post (potentially faster and more accurate indexing), or (and?) capture keywords the person typed into google (from the "query string", and display them on your page, with associated results - "You typed 'Pumpkin Soup'. Perhaps one of these articles will be of interest...".

What's happening is that you don't have very many backlinks and your site is fairly new so Google is not deep indexing your site. I do search optimization for a living I've got plenty of tips gleaned from from years of testing this stuff.

First...you can do what others suggested (submit site directly, and/or submit a sitemap) but it's not really good to do this more than once. Google does have a sitemap setup but that alone won't necessarily help bump up your deep pages.

I ended up writing a long response on specific things you can do to increase your individual post page rankings so I'm going to add it to FBS as a post.

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